I've always felt that game scores have always been weighted too much on the 5-10 side of the scale and it's always been rare for a game to receive a score less than 5. In fact, most games of the 1990s received on average somewhere between 6.5 and 7.5. Well if you are saying to yourself, "who cares?" Consider what a pool of video games looks like if you break down each score into standafd deviations. I did this for EGMs scores. What i found was that all the top scoring games had a standard dsviation of no more than 1.8 or so, and for those who are not great with statistics, a 1.8 is very good. Anything above 2 is outstanding, above 3 is almost unheard of. Meanwhile on the bottom rung of the scale of PS1 games is Flintstones Bedrock Bowling with an average score of 5/100. This is 3.38 standard deviations below the average.

The problem if you don't see it by now is the fact that because the games averages are so high to begin with, no game will ever be as far away from the center (but in the opposite direction) as Bedrock Bowling.

I believe that there are several reasons why games score so high and I'll break it down by most relevant to least.

1) video games tend to be an enjoyable experience. No matter what game you are playing, you are still sitting on a couch and manipulating things on a screen in front of you. No matter what, it's going to be more enjoyable than staring at a blank wall or putting a puzzle together. So it makes sense that basically every game that gets below a 6 is complete garbage. In fact I couldn't tell you the difference between a game that receives a 5.2 and a game that gets a 2.3.

2) advertising. Magazines had to rely on ad revenue for support and it's easy to see why a magazine may have been afraid to give a game a 3/10 when there is a full page ad for the game on the next page. A dumb 10 year old kid will see a 6/10 and still consider asking for it for Xmas even though we all know a 6/10 translates to a 3/10 or a D-.

3) the wider the scale, the higher the scores. Understandably it can be very difficult to gauge whether a game deserves a 6 or 7 out of 10. But imagine having 100 choices as was the case with Diehard Gamefan. Countless games received scores in the mid to upper 90s. It's as if they started at 100 and docked a point for each major problem with the game. "Oh the game has some annoying glitches, well that's gonna keep me from giving it anything higher than a 97." Next-gen rated on a 5 point scale and there were plenty of 1 star scores. How many games did Gamefan give a 20% score to? Don't think there were any, if only a handful.

4) they were comparing the scores to their test scores in school. Well since anything below 60% is failing, let's just not give any games below a 60% unless they are broken. Anything in the D or C range is below average, B or 80s is good, and A is very few mistakes. In my mind, a 2/5 Is lacking, a 1/5 is crap, 3/5 Is decent, 4/5 Is good, and 5/5 Is a classic.

Does anyone have any thoughts on game scores?